The goal of BMC AMI Data for Db2® is to provide our customers with cutting-edge innovation in data management processing to help drive their business and meet their customer demands. With the prevalence of social media use, advancements such as internet of things (IoT) and especially current artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, unstructured data (videos, PDFs, emails, images, etc.) is forecasted to make up 80 percent of data volumes by 2025.
IBM® Db2® for IBM® z/OS® has been prepared for this explosion in unstructured data with its commitment to Db2 large objects (LOBs), a data type specifically designed to bring unstructured data into the structured relational database world.
LOBs present unique challenges to Db2 users by introducing new indexes, table types, and especially pointers into Db2. Any experienced data management professional will tell you, when you have pointers, you have problems. These problems usually present in data integrity issues, where broken pointers mean data is effectively lost!
BMC AMI LOBMaster integration
Because managing these growing LOBs has been so difficult for Db2 users, BMC AMI Data introduced BMC AMI LOBMaster for Db2®. BMC AMI LOBMaster for Db2® customers have seen huge reductions in the CPU usage and time required to manage growing LOB data, and enjoy the fact that during the reorg process, the integrity of unstructured data is automatically checked, ensuring regulatory and legal compliance.
Given our commitment to helping our customers’ data-driven businesses and the challenges they are facing with the explosion of unstructured data, we are happy to announce that in our recent quarterly release for July 2024, we have integrated BMC AMI LOBMaster for Db2® into BMC AMI Reorg for Db2®. As of this release, every customer that licenses BMC AMI Reorg for Db2® as a standalone product or as part of a solution such as BMC AMI Utilities for Db2® or BMC AMI Database Performance for Db2®, will be able to manage and ensure data integrity of their Db2 LOBs automatically and efficiently with BMC AMI LOBMaster for Db2® built in!
Proper LOB maintenance requires the database administrator (DBA) to consistently run CHECK LOB, CHECK IX, and CHECK DATA, and then run a REORG. Most DBAs find this approach impractical and simply ignore all integrity checking, putting the business in jeopardy of regulatory and legal fines. Because unstructured data is often regulatory, compliance, or legal information (contracts, support phone call recordings, emails, etc.) that is written once and typically not accessed unless a lawsuit or complaint is filed years later, companies may not discover data corruption until it is critical and too late. Now, BMC AMI Reorg with Db2® with integrated BMC AMI LOBMaster for Db2® consolidates all the required processing into a single, efficient, high-speed solution, leaving the data online for application processing throughout the process.
Benefits of AMI LOBMaster integration
- Replace a four-step, manually intensive process with single, automated step guaranteeing data integrity and compliance.
- Reduce write time by up to 80 percent on a 200-GB LOB through parallel technology to manage growing data volumes.
- Simplify the rollout and maintenance of new LOB applications to expand and exploit the benefits of unstructured data.
- Understand your unstructured data, including inlining information with extensive LOB reporting.
To take advantage of the newly integrated BMC AMI LOBMaster for Db2® into your existing AMI Reorg processing, please contact your BMC account team or technical specialist.
